Unvalued

A fin whale’s call is a twenty-hertz pulse, below human hearing, and it carries across an ocean basin. A watershed decides whether a refinery’s effluent reaches a town or a marsh. A family decides, over dinner, what its money is for. None of these shows up on a balance sheet.

For most of the capital in the world, these acts are invisible and unvalued.

Unvalued is built around this gap. I build the data and systems that let money reach where it currently can’t: where an impact actually lands, who holds authority over it, and the decisions that were never written down. Usually that means building a model, a dataset or a tool. Sometimes it means an essay exploring the history and lineage of ideas in order to better understand how to solve them.

There’s a disconnect in how we assess the health of our world. Accountability sits within an organization: a legal entity with an address and a board. Impact happens in a place: a basin, a reef, a community. These two almost never share a boundary. A company owns subsidiaries that own assets that sit on land that drains into water other people drink. Every link in that chain is a dataset someone has, but nobody has connected them.

The opportunity to bring these disconnected data sets together is my offering for a better world. More collaborative, more connected, and more generative.

I think by building and creating. To me, the process of exploring a complex idea begins with trying to understand it from a number of different lenses. Here’s a few principles that are important to me.

Many have thought about the same concept. Conservation biology, governance theory, linguistics and organisational design all turn up in the same model, because most problems worth solving are actually caused by narrowing complexity into contained disciplines. Holding space for this complexity allows you to see more dimensions of a problem and see different possibilities for solving it.

Messy and expansive, then structured and formal. Exploring is allowed to be messy but deciding isn’t. When my old team wrote up how I work, the first rule was that no and yes aren’t opposites. They’re siblings, drawn together by context. A no is the start of a conversation: are we talking about the map or the territory, the forest or one tree? If the boulder won’t move, can it be melted?

Build with, not for. If you want to build a pier, ask the woodcutter, the angler, the lifeguard, the diver, the sunbather and the crab on the shore. Then spend a day as the lifeguard. A good critique is an expectation you hadn’t thought of. The best designers and builders can inhabit many dimensions of the problem before designing a solution.

A non-comprehensive list of things I like. Whales! A humpback song is built like a language: units into phrases, phrases into themes, themes into a song that every male in a population sings the same way. Then one of them changes it, and within a few seasons the new song has crossed the Pacific, carried by nothing but listening. It’s the most beautiful example of sharing method I’ve come across.

New York, in its many dimensions. The city gives me energy from its people its creativity and its passion. Upstate gives me cool water, bare feet, and slower way of living. It’s the best representation of extremes showing us what’s possible and how important it is to find balance.

Cookies. Photography, mostly of light on water. Linguistics, especially where one language has a word that holds a concept we can’t communicate in another. Tennis, so much tennis. Lists! Artists who explored a question ahead of their time. And probably a whole new set of things tomorrow…